Since DreamArts' business model revolves around replacing Lotus Notes installations, it makes sense for us to keep up-to-date with what is happening in Lotusland. Or in my case, to find out what Lotus Notes actually is. After a day at their show I am beginning to get an idea.

The main attraction today was the opening keynote speech by IBM's Lotus General Manager Michael Rodin, who announced the ship date of Lotus Notes/Domino 8 next month. The main focus for this release is on making the client more user-friendly, and they aim to achieve that by basing the new client on the Eclipse platform, which should make it much easier to develop plugins, especially the so-called Composite Applications, which combine data from Notes with other systems (they showed a Google Maps/Yahoo Finance mashup). The client also includes a small office suite (word processor, spreadsheets, presentations) based on the Open Document Format, so that you can maybe ditch Microsoft Office if you are so inclined. Despite this major architectural change, older Notes applications can still run unchanged (upgrading Notes seems to be a major challenge for companies). And if the new Java-client is too heavy for your machine (they warned about the need for a recent PC), you can still use the old client, albeit without support for the new features.

The keynote also mentioned new Web-2.0-inspired products in the Lotus portfolio, such as the terribly/trendily named Quickr (seems to be shared folders with frontends for Windows Explorer, MS Office and the browser) and the enterprise social networking software Connections.